Ethereum 2.0’s Nodes Need to Talk – A Solution Is ‘Hobbits’

Developers working to create the next iteration of the ethereum
blockchain have developed code intended to help client
developers boost their testing efforts ahead of the upgrade.

is by far the biggest upgrade on
the agenda of developers said to bring massive improvements to
scalability and usability on the now four-year-old blockchain
network, which with its $17 billion market capitalization is
the world’s second-most valuable blockchain. The work on the
2.0 iteration (also known as Serenity) continues apace, and
according to Fredik Harryson, chief technology officer for
client developer Parity, code specifications for the initial
phased roll-out of the upgrade are about half complete.

As such, while many aspects of the upgrade are still under
research and presently being finalized, on April 23 new code
was unveiled that, if approved and ultimately implemented, will
facilitate the basic communication between nodes that run the
ethereum 2.0 software.

The protocol, called Hobbits, was developed in partnership
between blockchain performance testing company Whiteblock,
ethereum venture capital studio Consensys, and ethereum 2.0
implementer teams Chainsafe and Yeeth.

In a introducing the
tech, Trenton Van Epps wrote:

“As Ethereum 2.0 clients get closer to live testnets, they’re
going to need a way to pass information back and forth
between each client. This occurs over a set of links called
the wire protocol.”

The wire protocol gets at the heart of how these distributed
networks work, because nodes pass critical information between
one another — namely transaction histories — that compose the
blockchain itself.

Speaking to CoinDesk back in February, ethereum founder Vitalik
Buterin explained that a wire protocol
essentially determines “the rules for what messages get
sent across the network.”

“For example, if two nodes talk to each other and one node
wants to sync to the blockchain or publish a block, then how do
you say I want to hear about a block? How do you say I want to
hear about transactions? ” Buterin told CoinDesk.

Ethereum 2.0 will be actually be leveraging a wire protocol
called “libp2p” developed and maintained by San Francisco-based
startup Protocol Labs, the firm behind projects like Filecoin
and IPFS. However, until that implementation is fleshed out for
all ethereum 2.0 clients, Hobbits is envisioned as a means to
establish cross-communication between those clients who don’t
have libp2p ready.

Jonny Rhea, a protocol engineer at Consensys who
contributed to building Hobbits, explained to CoinDesk:

“We don’t have libp2p yet so we needed to find a minimum wire
protocol, sort of like a test wire protocol, just until we
can put all the pieces together.”

Libp2p

Every blockchain, Buterin pointed out at the time, has a wire
protocol or “mini-language” to define how messages get
transmitted and received across the network. For bitcoin and
ethereum presently, the wire protocol uses what are called
gossip networks.

As Buterin told CoinDesk:

“For bitcoin and [ethereum 1.0], they’re both what we call
gossip networks. Anything that’s broadcasted eventually
reaches everyone but for [ethereum 2.0] we can’t do that
because there’s more total messages than any single node can
download.”

As such, the new ethereum 2.0 wire protocol – libp2p – will
have two major benefits. It will first leverage a new protocol
design called “gossipsub” to prevent the network from being
flooded and congested every time a node wants to send a
message.

“If I have a new block and I’m connected to six of my peers,
I’ll randomly send that block to two or three of my peers,”
Rhea said. “I propagate that message. Then those nodes have
peers, they don’t send it back to me, but they
probabilistically pick two more peer to send the message to.”

More generally, the second benefit of using a libp2p wire
protocol Rhea adds is modularity.

“The nice thing about libp2p is that it is modular,” Rhea said.
“Let’s say you don’t like … how one node finds another node on
the Internet. That can be replaced. It can be swapped out.”

At present, according to Van Epps, there are only two
implementations of libp2p for ethereum clients written in
programming languages Go and Rust.

However, Van Epps notes that “the long path to a ETH 2.0 launch
hinges on having proper implementations of libp2p for each
client language.”

As such, until these other implementations in programming
languages such as Java, Javascript, and Swift reach
completion, Hobbits will serve as a “minimal transport spec
that supports basic messaging types and allows nodes to
communicate with one another.”

Rhea told CoinDesk:

“There’s a lot of [research and development] stuff that we
want to be able to test. We developed this basic wire
protocol so that our team, Chainsafe and any other team that
doesn’t have a libp2p implementation in the [programming]
language their developing in can all make a [test network]
and basically still be able to communicate.”

Wires image via Shutterstock

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